The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate generally to the field of transparent displays. More particularly, embodiments of the inventive concepts disclosed herein relate to compact transparent display terrain representation.
Existing display systems for rendering terrain information for display on an aircraft use complex three-dimensional terrain datasets, which may be rendered from collections of point clouds representing latitude, longitude, and elevation of terrain locations. As the resolution of sampling of terrain increases with more accurate instruments (e.g., centimeter resolution sampling with LIDAR-based devices), digital storage requirements for large terrain databases may increase in kind, which may make it difficult for the terrain information to be effectively stored and rendered on avionics hardware conforming to regulatory requirements for size, weight, or energy demand. Existing vision systems, such as synthetic vision systems, may use complex point cloud data for rendering shaded terrain representations. However, when applied to transparent displays, the shaded terrain representations may occlude underlying features on which the shaded terrain representations are overlaid.